Comparison Ain’t Gonna Magically Turn into Compersion
A Poly Reminder for Those of Us Who Can’t Stop Being an Ass
The poly glossaries always define “compersion” as “the opposite of jealousy.” If they’re good glossaries, they go deeper. For example, Marie Thouin, author of the 2024 book What Is Compersion? Understanding Positive Empathy in Consensually Non-Monogamous Relationships, declares
Compersion is our wholehearted participation in the happiness of others. It is the sympathetic joy we feel for somebody else, even when their positive experience does not involve or benefit us directly.
Weirdly enough, this week’s Torah portion (called a parsha in Hebrew) contains perhaps the most radical expression of celebratory empathy I can think of in a Jewish Biblical text: the tale of the non-Israelite prophet Balaam, who is ordered by the Moabite king Balak to curse the Jewish people.
The Moabites and the Israelites have beef. They’ve been enemy tribes for a long time, with no plans to change any of that any time soon (spoiler alert: the radical empathy of a Moabite woman named Ruth is going to change all that eventually).*
The Torah tells us that the Moabites get pretty shaken up (the excellent online library Sefaria offers the translation “alarmed”) by the growing Jewish…
